Personal and Theological Crises

Well, I haven't posted in awhile. With good reason, I promise (hopefully people actually care enough about what I write so y'all were missing me!). School has overwhelmed with stuff to do, but that has little to do with why I haven't been able to make time to write the blog. Unfortunately, I've been having a lot of physical issues the past few weeks. Enough physical issues to make me think I was dying for a few days, and then even when I thought it was safe to say I wasn't dying I was still scared enough to not go to classes. I won't get into the details of what was going on, you'll just have to trust me that it was pretty darn scary and I hope no one ever has to go through with what I did. After a couple visits to the hospital and doctor we finally diagnosed me with general anxiety disorder. That is important to this blog.

Knowing I have general anxiety disorder has done a whole lot of things to me in the past week (it was last week to the day that I was diagnosed). A lot of positives have come out of it. The medication is helping me feel better and the awareness of my condition is also helping me be more aware of when I'm carrying extra tension and anxiety, and it's allowed me to better manage my time to sneak in some relaxing alone time. Best of all, though, it's actually been rather enlightening into my life history and personality. I now acknowledge why I am the way I am, and how frustrating it can be for other people and myself, and can look forward to a future without those characteristics.

On the flip side, though, being diagnosed with general anxiety disorder has launched me into a crisis. First of all, though I can look forward with hope to a new future, I also look forward with despair to a new future. What if I'm no longer the energetically humorous person I've always been? What if I'm not as efficient a worker as I've always been? What if my grades and other future responsibilities (pastoring a church, especially) suffer because I'm not as stressed out about doing well? I have a number of questions to answer about who I will be and whether or not I will like that person, and I'll only be able to answer those questions when I get there, which is more frustrating. Thankfully, though, this personality crisis is not the worst thing ever. I acknowledge first and foremost that other people in the world are going through much worse problems and dealing with medication is near the bottom of my concerns in the world. I also acknowledge that, though I've worked hard to become someone in Christ that I am happy with (of course, I still have lots of things to work on, but I'm happy with where I'm coming from now to work on those things), becoming a new person because of medication isn't either a good or bad thing. It is what it is, and I'll just have to work hard again to integrate something new in my life and still be a disciple of Christ.

My real crisis is theological. I think I've said that I don't drink alcohol ever. The reason is that I don't see any reason for a Christian to drink alcohol: if you drink to relax, why not pray to God and spend time with Him; if you drink to lose inhibitions, I first question why but I also question why you don't pray and talk to God about finding a new "you"; and then I question anyone who enjoys the taste because I doubt they did when they took their first sips. If you're smart, you may already see where I'm going with this. If I have a general anxiety issue, why don't I just pray to God to release me from my anxieties, knowing that everything is in control when we put it in God's hands? Better yet, why don't I become a good Christian and listen to Jesus when he says that we should not worry in the first place, God will provide?

So you see, because of a simple label on my life I've been thrown into a crisis. I know I need the medication because I haven't yet dealt properly with my condition in my 22 years of life, but if I took my theology seriously then I shouldn't take the medication, whether I "need" it or not. And if I do need the medication, then maybe my theology was incorrect and I need to rethink. That's never easy, for me at least.

I have a few options, then. Either I don't take the medication and deal with this on my own (on some level, I will have to change my life even with the medication, of course), or I adapt my theology to my personal experience. For me, the latter option is extremely scary because I don't think personal experience should have such a drastic impact on how I understand God and our relationship to Him. As a Methodist, I adhere to the quadrilateral for determining religious truth: experience, yes, but also tradition, Scripture, and reason. The other three tell me that God can do anything, experience tells me that maybe God can't do everything (or maybe that I just don't have a very good relationship with Him, which is no more satisfying at the moment).

Reaching a place like this means crisis. What it basically comes down to is I either change how I view God or change my opinion of myself. Acknowledging that God isn't all-powerful, or acknowledging that I don't really know God at all.

In talking all this out I think I'm coming to a conclusion, but I won't share it with you all. It's not the reason I wanted to share my story. The reason I wanted to share my story is that I want to say that we need to acknowledge when we have these types of crises. Wherever I come out on this I will feel more confident because I haven't taken all four pieces of the quadrilateral into serious consideration. I'll also be more confident because whatever my faith looks like from here on it'll know that God carried me through this difficult time. Maybe I need to change how I view God, but that shouldn't detract us from living into the crisis. "Flip-flopping" may be bad in politics but in our spiritual journey. God is always calling us to new and better understandings of Him. Of course, that might be a scary thought for you. It is for me. I prefer if God would just reveal Himself once to me and I understand it all completely right then. That's how I've understood revelation on my spiritual journey so far, but I'm beginning to see that God reveals Himself constantly to us. In those moments of God's presence we need to always reevaluate how He's revealing Himself to us. Maybe it's always the same and we can take heart in that. Maybe it's always the same but looks different and we just need to not lose heart. And maybe it's different, but that's how God chose to present Himself to us at that moment in our life and we need to take it as it is and not fight it too much.

Certainly, there's a fine line between relying on experience too much and not fighting at all for what we previously had concluded intellectually and in prayer, and not relying on experience at all and fighting too much to hold intact what we hold in dear in our mental cages. Take C.S. Lewis for example. He wrote about evil and suffering in the world in The Problem of Pain, but then he lost his wife a few years later and realized what he had written didn't totally hold up, so he wrote A Grief Observed. The experience made him realize that his mental construct of God and evil were, indeed, mental constructs, but he also didn't let his experience fully dictate to him what and who God is, a good portion of his original theology remained, just in a very different form.

I'm not asking that we move through our spiritual journey with such an open mind that we think it's incredibly awesome every time we hear about some new thing or experience something new, but I do think that God is so expansive that we need to constantly reevaluate how we view Him and His presence in our lives. We also need to reevaluate our own relationship with God. I, for one, now certainly realize that I do not spend nearly as much time in prayer with God and reading His holy word as I should. If I had, I might not be so darn anxious!